End-to-end ground calibration and in-flight performance of the FIREBall-2 instrument
Authors: Vincent Picouet, Bruno Milliard, Gillian Kyne, Didier Vibert, David Schiminovich, Christopher Martin, Erika Hamden, Keri Hoadley, Johan Montel, Nicole Melso, Donal OSullivan, Jean Evrard, Etienne Perot, Robert Grange, Shouleh Nikzad, Philippe Balard, Patrick Blanchard, Frederi Mirc, Nicolas Bray, April Jewell, Samuel Quiret
Abstract: The payload of the Faint Intergalactic Redshifted Emission Balloon (FIREBall-2), the second generation of the FIREBall instrument (PI: C. Martin, Caltech), has been calibrated and launched from the NASA Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility (CSBF) in Fort Sumner, NM. FIREBall-2 was launched for the first time on the 22nd September 2018, and the payload performed the very first multi-object acquisition from space using a multi-object slit spectrograph (MOS). This performance-oriented paper presents the calibration and last ground adjustments of FIREBall-2, the in-flight performance assessed based on the flight data, and the predicted instrument's ultimate sensitivity. This analysis predicts that future flights of FIREBall-2 should be able to detect the HI Ly\alpha resonance line in galaxies at z~0.67, but will find it challenging to spatially resolve the circumgalactic medium (CGM).
Explore the paper tree
Click on the tree nodes to be redirected to a given paper and access their summaries and virtual assistant
Look for similar papers (in beta version)
By clicking on the button above, our algorithm will scan all papers in our database to find the closest based on the contents of the full papers and not just on metadata. Please note that it only works for papers that we have generated summaries for and you can rerun it from time to time to get a more accurate result while our database grows.